Sabreen Mohammed: From HCDE to Fashion Start Up CEO

Please tell me about your background?

I’m a recent HCDE graduate from the class of 2022. I grew up loving all things creative, from painting to (much later) computer programming. I’ve been interested in sewing and fashion since 2009 when a neighbor introduced me to Project Runway.

My primary motivation for getting into product management, human-centered design, and entrepreneurship was to make the world better for those people who feel like they don’t fit in.

I’ve been a minority in many different constructs throughout my life. This has motivated me to focus on accessibility research, universal design in education, and creating inclusive environments.

What is Novoloom?

Novoloom is a fashion technology company that aims to democratize bespoke tailoring.

Our first product line, Mosaic by Novoloom is a lot like an IKEA furniture kit, but for assembling your own custom clothing. You can choose and customize an outfit in our virtual clothing editor, and we turn it into a sew-by-numbers kit using our garment compiler software and micro-factory.

Currently, sewing can be inaccessible and has a steep learning curve. With our sew-by-numbers kits, we want sewing your own luxurious bespoke clothing super easy, like a soft jigsaw puzzle, or a “connect the dots with thread” activity.

In the long term, we aim to change the fashion industry by providing a more sustainable, inclusive alternative to higher end fast-fashion stores like Zara. We also believe that there are people who want to customize their own clothing, but not sew it themselves, so our big picture vision involves serving this user group too.

Where do you want to see Novoloom going?

I want Novoloom to become the tool for clothing creation. I envision instead of going back-to-school shopping at the mall or scrolling online stores for hours, you’ll spend the last days of summer on call with your buddies to design your first day of school outfit on the Novoloom app.

Maybe your artistic friend will post their design and let you remix it like a Canva template. Or an influencer might let you co-design their outfit, or collaborate on it like how you would make a TikTok duet.

Novoloom could make dressing rooms in shopping malls, a thing of the past.

The UX of fashion design tools and apparel manufacturing technology are the two “missing links” that we are focusing on.

Remember how scary video production was before TikTok turned it into a fun pastime that literally anyone could do on their phones? I see Novoloom’s garment editor using similar UX strategies like adding powerful design recommendation features to smooth creative blocks, completion features that help reduce the technical skill needed to execute a great design, or incorporating generative AI to augment the creative experience.

Fashion manufacturing is not automated and is highly dependent on human labor. This means that any improvements to sewing efficiency need to be highly human centric for at least another decade or two. Novoloom believes its digital tools can improve efficiency and precision.

What advice do you have for HCDE alums even though you are a recent grad yourself?

If you are busy and already starting a career, I believe that there’s a lot of value in finding a fun side project using your HCDE learnings to solve a problem in your own life or community. We are fortunate to have the tools to explore, research and even build things. Don’t be afraid to go for something small if you aren’t ready to make that your career yet.

Retaining basic coding skills that you learned in HCDE. A base level of technical skill helps you communicate with developers, and intuitively estimate the feasibility of your designs. Building empathy and mutual respect for your engineering team goes a really long way.

Tell me about your time at the HCDE program

I’m thinking back to the monster winter storm in January 2019 and how much we complained about this weird “Zoom” app we were forced to use and a lot of us were like “this is ridiculous, you can’t deliver a college design education over a series of ZOOM CALLS. We’re just going to give up and check out until the snow melts”. I have a hard time imagining us saying anything like that now.

HCDE was a strange experience because we started in person, learned how to HCDE in person, and then everything was turned on its head when COVID sent us virtual in March 2020. It was chaotic, but made us adaptable. The dynamic between professors and students was a little warmer, like “hey we’re just as confused as you are, but we have to keep going and we’re going to figure it out together”. We had to re-think every design process that took in-person meetings for granted, from whiteboarding to sticky-note ideation to paper prototypes to bodystorming to usability testing. I remember flipping through our HCDE 318 textbook of design methods and thinking like “nope, nope, nope, can’t do that one, can’t do that one anymore either”.

It was a trial by fire and 2020 told us loudly and clearly, “the world changes whether you’re ready or not”. Most of my cohort works in tech, so that mindset will probably be key to surviving the fast pace of that world.

Tell me about the HCDE faculty who helped you through your journey?

I first heard about HCDE when Dr. Julie Kientz visited my high school when I was 14 or 15 years old. I emailed Dr. Kientz asking how I could learn more, and she told me to come in over the summer and shadow her Ph.D student Kyle Rector while she conducted interviews for her Kinect App, Eyes Free Yoga.

During my time as an HCDE undergrad, I learned a lot from my professors Brock Craft, Cindy Atman, and Mark Zachry. I also had some amazing, inspiring TAs like Regina Cheng and Aaron Joya.

My advisor, Alex Llapitan was instrumental in letting me create a really rich interdisciplinary education. I was able to explore human centered design in unconventional places like the neural engineering and brain-computer interface minor, philosophy and ethics courses, Creating a Company I and II, psych classes that helped me understand research practices, DRAMA 250 that taught me how to create for an audience, political science (which is essentially a study of human behavior) and more. My friends were sometimes jealous that I had an advisor like Alex because apparently other departments are pretty rigid and give you no leeway with your graduation requirements. This is so unfortunate to me because the most important moments of my education involved making connections between classes in entirely different departments, and piecing it all together to form a cohesive worldview. Making everyone read the same books, go to the same classes, and listen to the same lectures is no way to bring new and interesting ideas into the mix.